


On Eyes

by PunkHazard



Series: A Letter [5]
Category: Bleach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:11:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But one thing that caught and still keeps Yumichika's attention: Ikkaku has beautiful eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Eyes

The first time Yumichika met Ikkaku, he noted several things: decent face, lean body (partly from being hungry all the time, mostly from daily brawls), and an ugly expression. But one thing that caught and still keeps Yumichika's attention: Ikkaku has beautiful eyes.

He doesn't mean the little red marks at the corners, but he supposes those are pretty cute too. They do, after all, distract from his unsightly bald head.

Beneath the intensity, under his always-pissed-off-and-impatient furrowed brows, Ikkaku welcomes death like an old friend finally come home. Yumichika finds that odd and just a little bit thrilling; they are, after all, already dead.

Ikkaku's eyes are lost. Unsure of his origin, unsure of his destination, he drifts from district to district, aimless, purposeless, scanning the crowds for a man strong enough to kill him. In a way, they're like everyone else's.

Being dead is strange and new and not at all that pleasant and everyone's lost, in their own way. Everyone builds walls to keep everyone else out, and everyone learns that just because you've already died once, doesn't mean you won't die again, and if there's one thing you can't trust, it's other people. Few men have gazes so sharp, or so dead.

But strip away the distrust, the loneliness, the boredom that comes with death, the will to die again, and what remains is what Yumichika likes to imagine is a core of molten steel. Untempered, malleable, waiting for someone to shape and mold. When Ikkaku smiles- usually while limping away from a particularly brutal fight, and only when no one is watching- his eyes flash and Yumichika wonders how any dead man could look so alive.

Yumichika thinks Ikkaku's eyes, so honest but clouded by indecision and hesitation, remind him of a wild beast's, caged and chained.

When Ikkaku met Kenpachi, Yumichika worried that his eyes would lose all their depth, all their grief and insecurity- all that made them both utterly fascinating and heartwrenching.

They did.

But for all the ways they changed, Ikkaku's eyes are still honest. His impatience tempered by grudging affection for their lieutenant; the way he stopped wondering when he could die because he's too busy running drills, or drinking, or fighting. He's stronger, his eyes clearer; he knows who he is, what he wants to do, if not exactly how to do it.

Things that mattered before- what his life was like, who his family was, what his purpose is- stopped being so important.

Yumichika finds that what attracted him most to Ikkaku in the first place wasn't his intensity, or the way he was so out of place in Soul Society. It's just been such a long time since he's met anyone with eyes that couldn't lie.


End file.
